Textured occupancy grids for monocular localization without features

A textured occupancy grid map is an extremely versatile data structure. It can be used to render human readable views and for laser rangefinder localization algorithms. For camera-based localization, landmark or feature based maps tend to be favored in current research. This may be because of a tacit assumption that working with a textured occupancy grid with a camera would be impractical. We demonstrate that a textured occupancy grid can be combined with an extremely simple monocular localization algorithm to produce a viable localization solution. Our approach is simple, efficient, and produces localization results comparable to laser localization results. A consequence of this result is that a single map representation, the textured occupancy grid, can now be used for humans, robots with laser rangefinders, and robots with just a single camera.